#al-drumlord

[al-drumlord]

General Update 20 April

At the time of the last post I had created the samplers for all the non percussion rack slots as well as the sample selection section and the mixer. A big part of my work this month has been merging this work with the mouse area work I previously demonstrated on this blog. 

This is what the main instrument view looks like now.

Here’s a reminder of what the mouse area macro looks like with added inputs, to recap the Mouse Area module at the top provides logic output from MO (Mouse Over) when a cursor is placed over the area, that triggers the hold module on the right, while the time of the hold is dictated by the the inputs of the other mouse over macros, into the compare module and then into the multiply module. If another mouse over is active the output of the compare module is 0 which makes the time of the hold 0. This results in only one sample’s edit window is able to appear at one time, which considerably cleans up the GUI and allows us to have one small section for nine samplers. 

The work I have done looks relatively simple but it took a lot of work to get it all together, I believe the fact I had done most of the work separately saved some time and allowed me to think more clearly about how it will turn out this created its own problems. For some reason, every so often when a module or connector is copied between macros and ensembles it can not line up with the existing ones, this is observable in the above screenshot as some of the inputs and logic OR gates aren’t very neat, that is purely because of this. Also when a macro is copied over from another ensemble the panel view of that macro sometimes doesn’t maintain its layout. Which means I would have to re-align it.

So finally this is what the edit window and the whole panel looks like now.

The next steps for the project are finishing the sampler modules for the percussion rack, creating the effect modules and the GUI.

[al-drumlord]

Update 22 March 2015

I haven’t updated this blog as much as I’d like, but here’s one on my progress with the actual Reaktor patch.

The theme of the past few weeks has been stripping back, I’ve spent time looking at all the features that I thought up at the start of the project and deciding whether they were vital features or even whether they were worth doing at all.

The drum selection section is a good example of this process, my original vision for this section would have been a matrix allowing the user to first choose a stand, and which drum they were able to select depended on which stand they chose, however this proved to be more difficult to achieve in Reaktor than I originally thought, and after careful thought I came to the conclusion that it was more effort that it was worth, and my target audience of singer-songwriters that need access to drums easily may appreciate clear and quick access to the drums they want more.

This was more of a visual element than an practical one, inside the macros are a visual representation of which drums the user has selected, the lamp (the module with the orange box titled “1″) represents the colour of the slot they are working with. 

As of now the visual representation of which drum has been chosen is a text box.

The important bit of this macro is the list module (far left) which controls the which drum is being selected, the list module can be represented as a set of buttons, drop down, list, or spin menu. 

This is what the drum selection section looks like so far.

The dropdown menu is connected into the input named ‘Sel’, which then selects which of the three macros are visible and enabled, a non zero value also triggers another lamp.

This is what the edit windows look like so far.

They are then connected to a stereo mixer module, which is a normal mixer module but it also allows you to pan, I added a simple boolean switch to allow the user to enable or mute a slot if they wish.

After everything is connected it looks like this:

[al-drumlord]

I've been doing some recording and here is some photos from the first recording session I did with the help of Rhodri and my other friend Adam Davis. I am currently in the process of editing the files from the first session and organising the next sessions.

[al-drumlord]

Here is the audio files from my drum test recording session the other week. It's the three mic set ups in a row, which are a spaced large diaphragm pair, a spaced small diaphragm pair and finally an XY small diaphragm pair, respectively. 

(backup link)

[al-drumlord]

General Update 24/11/14 - Mouse areas

Today I worked on figuring out the new mouse over capabilities in Reaktor 5.9.2. I was keen to learn this new feature as I hope to use this to make it possible for the user to be presented each drum's edit options by placing their mouse over it. 

I experimented with many ways of achieving this, for example through the use of the value module, which presents a specific value once triggered by a signal, however the technique that worked best was using the hold module, which holds a value in one state for a specific amount of time.

However I needed a way to turn the current mouse area off when you enter another, the way I achieved this is by using a compare module, which reads the A and the B input and outputs a 0 or a 1 value depending on whether A is less than, equal to or more than B, as the input values I was working with were also 0 and 1 I felt 0.5 was the perfect B value to use to avoid any confusion. If the mouse enters one of the other mouse areas the A value is changed to 1 which is more than 0.5 which changes the less than output to 0 therefore changing the hold time to 0 and turning off the original mouse area. This way was useful for various reasons but mainly because through use of the Logic OR module I can add as many mouse areas to this algorithm as I need, also as there is a time limit the edit windows won't clog up the GUI forever. 

The next step for this system would be to implement a close button in case the user is done with the window before the hold time is over and to connect this algorithm to to a stacked macro index to actually show a window. Other possible uses for this would be an overlay credits window or help.